Jump Crypto Trading Firm Recovers $140 million Stolen Crypto From Wormhole Hack – Here’s what happened
Jump Crypto, a Chicago-based crypto arm that Jump Trading has helped to develop the DeFi project Wormhole, was able to counter-exploit Wormhole’s hacker and recover $140 million worth tokens.
According to a Recent Blog post. A coordinated effort by Jump Crypto and Oasis (which develops multisignature wallet software) led to the recovery certain assets associated with the Wormhole exploiter wallet address.
Oasis claimed that a Whitehat group supported the project, but blockchain data suggests Jump Crypto could be responsible as ownership of the wallets used in counter-exploit can be traced back to Jump Crypto.
Oasis announced that it received an order by the High Court of England & Wales on February 21 requiring it take steps to recover certain stolen assets.
According to the DeFi platform, the attacker used it in one step of his attack. A Whitehat group reached out with a plan to retrieve the assets. They also provided a Proof of Concept.
“What happened on 21 February 2023 was possible only because of a previously unknown vulnerability to the admin multisig access.”
Oasis claimed that the funds were returned to an authorized third party, and that it has no control over them. It said that it could also confirm that the assets were transferred to a wallet controlled and maintained by the third party authorized by court order.
Crypto Exploits Still Abound
According to reports, a hacker took 120,000 ETH tokens from the Wormhole cross chain bridge in early 2022. This was the fourth largest crypto theft. This was not the only hack that occurred in the last year.
According to Immunefi (a bug bounty and security platform for the Web3 ecosystem), the crypto industry lost $4 billion in digital assets to fraud, hacks and rug pulls. Five major exploits amounted to $2,361,000,000 each.
Hackers stole $625 million of Ethereum and USDC from Axie Infinity’s Ronin Blockchain. This was followed by Wormhole at $326 million, Nomad at $190 million, BNB Chain at $570 million, and FTX at $650 million. Together, these figures account for 60% of all crypto losses in 2022.
After a flash-loan attack, DeFi protocol Platypus Finance suffered a loss of $8.5 million last week. The hacker was eventually tracked down and funds recovered with the assistance of some on-chain sleuths.